On PHPBuilder.com today there's a quick tutorial showing you how to build an RSS aggregator that can pull in RSS content and drop it into a MySQL table.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a Web format that allows website owners to distribute their latest and frequently updated content in a standardized way. RSS feed is actually an XML document that can be easily read by using RSS reader software or built-in functions in programming languages, such as PHP or Java. In this article, the focus will be on building a RSS aggregator in PHP.

They introduce the basics of an RSS feed - a specially formatted XML document with values for individual posts (like "title" and "link". They provide the SQL structure for the "article" and "feed" tables and the code to pull out each "feed" record, parse it and drop that into the "article" table for later consumption. They show two different methods for getting the content - one using file_get_contents and another using cURL.